Visa and Reap Expand Stablecoin Card Programs

For investors, this is a clear signal that stablecoins are becoming a payment infrastructure story, not just a crypto story. The economics are attractive: card programs can reduce reliance on pre-funded balances, improve cross-border liquidity management and cut the friction of weekend and off-hours settlement by moving obligations onchain. That creates a new toll road for Visa, which earns from network activity, and a potentially faster-growth distribution channel for fintech partners that can package treasury, payouts and spend management into one card experience.

The strategic implication is bigger than one partnership. Visa is effectively hardening its moat by embedding stablecoin settlement into the same global merchant acceptance network that already reaches 175 million locations. That makes it harder for alternative rails to displace card usage while still capturing the upside from blockchain-native money movement. Reap, meanwhile, gains a powerful global partner and first-mover status as the first Asia-based fintech to enable stablecoin credit card issuing at scale with Visa.

The market should also pay attention to the next phase: multicurrency stablecoin cards and agentic commerce, where AI-driven payment execution is handled within defined rules and compliance guardrails. If that sounds speculative, it is still the direction the payments stack is headed. The winners are the companies that own compliant infrastructure, settlement and distribution, not just the tokens themselves.

For now, the actionable takeaway is straightforward: stablecoin adoption is increasingly a fee-rich, enterprise-grade payments opportunity, and Visa remains one of the best-positioned picks-and-shovels beneficiaries. Reap’s expansion may be a template for the next wave of global card programs, but Visa is the one turning that wave into a network effect.